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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22866979">The Scars That Make Us Whole</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cullhach/pseuds/Cullhach'>Cullhach</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ambiguous/Open Ending, Ends just after the timeskip, Family Feels, Gen, Good Parent Jeralt Reus Eisner, Growing Pains, Hint of Angst, Introspection, My Unit | Byleth Learns Emotions, excessive use of metaphor, no beta we die like Glenn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 06:27:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,455</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22866979</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cullhach/pseuds/Cullhach</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Byleth felt something inside of himself cracking.  He felt it when Jeralt died, the fractures growing into fissures that even tears could seep through.  He had never wept before, had never felt so overwhelmed with emotion that he needed to.  </p>
<p>He wept, and he held his father's calloused hand in the half-light.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jeralt Reus Eisner &amp; My Unit | Byleth, My Unit | Byleth &amp; Sothis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>51</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Scars That Make Us Whole</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Byleth’s earliest memories were of waking, of chilled morning air stinging his nose and seeping into the gaps left behind as he turned beneath the blankets. </p>
<p>He could still smell the pine smoke in the prelight of dawn. It clung fast to the fabric of their clothing with invisible fingers, holding to the men and blankets and tents long after the fire was gone.  He could hear the soft fall of booted feet in the brush as Jeralt returned to wake him. His father, who had calloused hands that were rough like the bark of a tree.</p>
<p>Byleth would wake, and he would watch his father use his hands.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-o-o-o-o-o-</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Byleth discovered a birds nest with three eggs, blue as the sky.  He took one to show Jeralt. His father liked blue things.  </p>
<p>The egg broke.  Jeralt smiled an odd sort of smile when he saw Byleth’s hands covered in yolk and sticky bits of shell; told him that he shouldn’t take eggs from their nests because then they couldn’t become birds. </p>
<p>Byleth hadn’t meant to hurt the egg. He hadn't known. He thought he felt something then, looking at the broken pieces that would never become a bird, but he didn’t know what to call it.  </p>
<p>Jeralt’s hands were gentle when he helped to wash the pieces off.</p>
<p>His father's hands held weapons meant to hurt.  He had never hidden this fact from Byleth. Jeralt had hands that hurt people when he needed to, but Byleth knew he could also hold an egg without breaking it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-o-o-o-o-o-</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Sometimes Byleth would dream before waking and see things that he didn’t understand. </p>
<p>Sometimes there was a girl.  She was familiar in the way that a moment he’d never lived could be familiar, as though he’d seen it before seeing it, the memory of something he had yet to experience.  (Jeralt was quiet when he tried to explain it).</p>
<p>Most of the time she just wanted to sleep, the same weary sort of sleep that the men would want after a difficult fight. Sometimes, though, she would start to wake up, and some part of Byleth would stir in response.</p>
<p>She spoke the day he met those three children, and then she turned back time.</p>
<p>Her name was Sothis, and Sothis shared some part of his mind.  It was unsettling. It made him feel exposed, to be seen with such discerning eyes as hers, to be understood in a way that no one else could.  She knew the thoughts that he had never shared, and in return she spoke words that only he could hear. The men knew the Ashen Demon, but Sothis knew Byleth.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-o-o-o-o-o-</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Jeralt watched him with careful eyes, saw him with the children, and Byleth almost thought he could see the faintest gleam of approval reflecting back.  Jeralt made excuses about being a knight and owing favors despite his reluctance, but Byleth suspected that he had other reasons to stay.</p>
<p>The monastery was full of strange surprises, but the biggest mystery of all was the archbishop.  Byleth didn’t understand Rhea. She looked at him, yes, but her eyes never seemed to see, staring past him into some far distance.  She couldn’t see him, and he didn’t know what it meant. Jeralt’s unease only added to his own.</p>
<p>Rhea’s hands were soft, the kind of hands that had known kindness and shown it in turn.  They still knew it’s memory, but they had grown cold with time, stretching, seeking for a warmth just out of reach.</p>
<p>She wanted him to teach, and that was when Byleth truly knew what it was to be afraid.  He barely knew them, these children, but he could see the fine fractures that riddled the shadows on their faces, and he didn’t know what to do.  He was supposed to help them to grow, but growth meant movement. How far could he move a broken thing before it would crumble in his hands?</p>
<p>Time passed. </p>
<p>Byleth taught, and in teaching, learned.  He learned to see the world outside of himself.  He learned to love the strange people that surrounded him, and while he wasn’t sure if that sentiment had started out as Sothis’ or his own, it was his in the end and that was what mattered.  He learned that everyone was always more than they seemed, that his own father was almost as full of secrets as Rhea. He learned about Sothis.</p>
<p>Sothis, who was a god.  Sothis, who could have taken him at any time.  She could have buried his will with her own and left him the empty shell that people used to think he was, free for her own use.  She could have danced again. It wasn’t something he’d realized right away, but as time passed the idea grew into a sure knowledge.  She could have taken him at any time.</p>
<p>But she never did.</p>
<p>As much as she would gripe when they didn’t agree, she would wave her hand with an exasperated pout, then sit back and watch.  Sothis actively chose not to hurt. She was simply there, her hands clasped, and after a while, Byleth could feel that something was changing.  He smiled more. He frowned more, too, and Sothis smiled and frowned and slept and watched.</p>
<p>Sothis, whose hands were perhaps the most able of any hands to hurt and destroy.  Her hands, he thought, were the hands of someone who knew how to hold an egg.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-o-o-o-o-o-</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Byleth felt something inside of himself cracking.  He felt it when Jeralt died, the fractures growing into fissures that even tears could seep through.  He had never wept before, had never felt so overwhelmed with emotion that he needed to.  </p>
<p>He wept, and he held his father's calloused hand in the half-light.</p>
<p>Sothis was awake then, her own warm hand on his shoulder, but she didn’t say anything.  He almost wished that he could go back to being empty. At least that hadn’t hurt.</p>
<p>
  <em> Almost</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-o-o-o-o-o-</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Sothis was gone.  </p>
<p>He had been tricked, trapped in the never ending dark.  If ever she was justified in crushing his will and taking his form for her own, it was then.  She was a god, and he was the mortal shell prepared for the very purpose of being her vessel. She had not chosen to share a consciousness any more than he had, and he would not have faulted her in choosing to stay.  She could have escaped. </p>
<p>Sothis knew all of this, and Sothis had chosen to set him free instead.</p>
<p>He felt himself cracking again, filled as he was with gratitude and loss.  He felt the fissures growing and the pieces falling away in her absence, but he did not fall apart in the way he expected.  Sothis had warm hands, and she had held him gently until the emptiness inside of him receded. Something was alive beneath his breaking shell, and she had chosen to relinquish her own will so that it would have the chance to fly.</p>
<p>He realized then, as he stepped out of the dark, that breaking is not the end, not always.  Some things need to break a little before they can truly become.</p>
<p>That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.</p>
<p>Byleth stepped out from the shadows and tried to hold the children in the best way he knew, because for them it was too soon.  The cracking and breaking was too soon, and it was all he could do to hold the pieces together. He tried to hold them like his father.  Like Sothis.</p>
<p>(He knew he didn't have enough hands, but he tried anyway)</p>
<p>War broke out.  Edelgarde attacked, and everything tumbled out of Byleth’s grasping reach.  Byleth fell in turn, and the immaculate one screamed for the loss of the one she'd never seen. He fell down down down into the shadows, and some part of himself was afraid that he might not be able to come back this time.  </p>
<p> </p>
<p>(He was lost.  His hands felt sticky, but something warm brushed against his forehead).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>He thought he heard <em> her </em> voice, and it held him together until he could stand again on his own, soaking wet as a stranger pulled him from a river and spoke of five years lost to war, destruction, and sorrow.</p>
<p>Byleth listened.  He saw the distant monastery rising against the sky, and thought that he finally had a name for that first feeling, the one he’d discovered so long ago in that forest with his father and the birds egg.  He looked at his hands, scarred and rough from learning. They were far from soft, but maybe, if he was careful, they could still be gentle enough to hold the pieces of an eggshell.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I had some feelings about this game and needed to get them out because they were aggressively blocking me from writing the fic I am supposed to be writing.  Thank you for reading this in all of it's ambiguous glory hahah.</p>
<p>Title was shamelessly lifted from the Edguy song "Landmarks."</p></blockquote></div></div>
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